Greg Standen is this amazing Marketer who I have known for several years. He has hard a very hard life, but remains a beautiful giving man! A great example to follow!
I am very lucky to be in the position these days where people ask me one powerful question in relation to building my own business from scratch “Edward can you please show me how you did it?”.
A simple Small Business question, but the answer is layers of reasoning, questions, big wins, big mistakes, countless hours and lots of subjective reasoning and thinking. Talking more to Small Business Marketing Strategies, Ideas and Selling for more clients, one reason I often give to many is about the generous nature in which I built my business from day one.
Talking more to Consultants, Mentors, Coaches and Service Providers in this article – many of us are selling ideas, knowledge and thinking. It’s the extreme of “Intangible Marketing” – you are often selling something which most of it’s value is unable to be held or touched. If someone for example hires me to train them in Sales & Marketing – what have I “actually done” for them? What is the outcome?
This is quite often the result we are selling, we are pledging to the market our knowledge will give them an outcome they are after. Be it feeling better, more sales, easier selling, increased confidence or whatever the case – it’s a tough sell!
As a Sales & Marketing Mentor when I started out, I would get often compared to Business Coaches, Sales Coaches and other Marketing People in people considering to hire me. Even early days when I was starting out, I remember I used to win lots of business compared to others for one simple reason – I gave people a lot more on the house than everyone else.
For example, if you are reading this blog – I am giving out my own lessons and experiences for free to awesome people like yourself. Of course you are on my website and I hope you join my database or purchase something, but if you don’t that is totally cool! I am just glad my materials are helping you and feel free to spread the word.
That thinking above has always greatly helped me. Quite a few Business People out there don’t often make it for what I feel is because they just aren’t “Giving People”. I knew one Business Coach that would never give anything on the house. If you were going to do business with them, they would get you to sign a 12 month contract and then the goods would come.
Quite often, people would have spoken to me and in a 30 minute coffee I would have solved their top problems on the house. The few Coaches and Consultants who don’t get it laugh at me (although many are back in the workforce now) saying something like “But Edward, you got to hold things back to get people into your program”.
Besides this feeling “Just Wrong” to me, the thinking applied here is quite different. My view which has worked is that if I solve someone’s problems in 30 minutes over a coffee for free, imagine what I could do for them if they hired me?
This isn’t just your time, you can give away free videos, content, articles – basic information in a leveraged fashion to help improve the quality of peoples lives.
I know plenty of awesome Business Coaches that do exactly that and guess what? They are successful, awesome people that do well and make lots of money for their clients and themselves.
My advice? In a commercially viable manner work out how you can give people great free stuff to help them. Scratch their back first!
Hope you enjoyed this read and putting my money where my mouth is, sign up and join my database for some awesome Free Sales & Marketing Materials!
Love your work and happy days! Edward Zia – Marketing Mentor who loves giving first!
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